Micro Representative

Michael McBride is President of Storm Brewing in Newfoundland Ltd.As a business and economics graduate of Bishop's University, the home of Québec's first brewpub, Michael started his brewing career in the mid-nineties as a sales representative for The Premium Beer Company in Ontario.
This was followed by a sales position with Conners Brewery and then as plant manager for Hart Breweries.
After moving to Newfoundland, Michael and his wife, Kristi, founded STORM BREWING in Nfld Ltd. in 1999.
Independently owned and operated, STORM produces British style and specialty ales.
Michael is an avid hockey player, and he enjoys meeting brewers and visiting breweries in his travels from California, to the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, to Namibia.

With 19 years of brewing experience, Michael is pleased to represent the interests of small brewers of Ontario and Atlantic Canada as a Board member of Beer Canada.

As a business and economics graduate of Bishop's University, the home of Quebec's first brewpub, Michael started his brewing career in the mid-nineties as a summer sales representative for The Premium Beer Company in Ontario.
This was followed by a sales position with Conner¹s Brewery and as plant manager for Hart Breweries.

After moving to Newfoundland, Michael and his wife, Kristi, founded Storm Brewing in Nfld Ltd. in 1999, where they continue to brew their popular British style and specialty ales.
With 15 years of brewing experience, Michael looks forward to representing the interests of small brewers in Ontario and Atlantic Canada on the Brewers Association of Canada Board of Directors.

Michael McBride of Newfoundland's Storm Brewing Company says the ale is selling at twice the rate of the company's other brews, the Killick, Kyle, and Baccalieu Light ales.
The brewery has just made its third batch of hemp ale.

Early on, the product's future was quite uncertain.
McBride initially made the decision to brew hemp ale when he heard of one being sold by a brewery in British Columbia.
He received approval from the Newfoundland Liquor Commission in late 1998, but they rescinded the approval before the year was out at the request of the Commission's president, Fraser Lush.
The Commission told McBride that he would need their approval as well as Health Canada's and the police's before he could make any more of the ale.
He was instructed to throw out all of his next batch.

It took McBride six months to learn that the approval of neither Health Canada nor the police was necessary.
A Health Canada license is only necessary for derivatives of hemp, and the beer simply had hemp seed as an ingredient.
Police approval is not necessary for any hemp product.
"For all those months, all the information we were given was false," said McBride.

"I can remember them way back when," says Michael McBride of Storm Brewing in St. John's.

...

"We're obviously the tiniest brewery in Newfoundland, we might even be the smallest brewery in Canada," McBride told The Sunday Independent.

Tucked away in a St. John's industrial park, the brewery is set up in a run-down blue and white building that McBride describes as resembling anything but a brewery.Inside, the building is dominated by four large vats that look as if they were built by a shipwright because of the large wrought-iron bands that bind the strips of oak in place.

McBride hopes the rebirth of stubbys in the province will whet the appetites of beer drinkers and give the company a little more exposure.

"A lot of people don't even know we exist," says McBride.

...

"For the most part, people were looking for something more along the lines of imports," McBride says of Canadian beer drinkers' changing tastes.